China’s government is hunting down signatories of the Charter 08 reform manifesto and upgrading its internet censorship software to allow the authorities to identify and suppress dissent much earlier and efficiently.
Nearly 7,000 intellectuals, farmers, students, journalists, and activists have endorsed Charter 08, modeled after the Czechoslovakian dissidents Charter 77, which warns of “the possibility of a violent conflict of disastrous proportions” in the absence of democratic reform.
The communist authorities appear hypersensitive to the risk of unrest as widespread lay-offs and declining economic growth, fearing that economic insecurity could lead the charter to become a rallying call for unemployed graduates.
Bao Tong, a former top Communist Party official jailed for seven years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, signed the charter as “a citizen”. “Would the powers-that-be please tell 1.3 billion people why freedom is a crime?” he wrote recently.
Senior government officials have expressed concern that high unemployment among migrant workers could foment further unrest and instability in 2009, a year in which the ruling Communist party celebrates 60 years in power, while dissidents and democrats will seek to highlight the 90th anniversary of the 4th May protest movement or Chinese Enlightenment and the 4th June 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
China’s internet police are using state-of-the-art internet spying technology to pre-empt criticism and manage public opinion, according to the country’s leading provider of search technology.
Officials are under huge pressure following recent events like the Sichuan earthquake, the Olympics, and the economic crisis, He Zhaohui, marketing manager at TRS, told the Financial Times. “Among those working in the news and propaganda in China the heart attack rate is highest,” he said.
The Communist regime has based its legitimacy on its performance in delivering sustained economic growth and improved living standards rather than on a discredited marxist-leninist ideology. For that reason, analysts suggest, it is acutely sensitive to the political implications of the current economic crisis and is consequently wary of any calls for reform.
“The Party apparently thinks–probably correctly–that further economic reform would threaten the country’s authoritarian system, so the Party will not sponsor much more change,” writes Gordon G. Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China.”So it should come as no surprise that this slow-or-no-reform period coincides with a time of political retrenchment.”
Zimbabwean human rights activist Jestina Mukoko is one of 17 activists charged with conspiracy to overthrow Mugabe's regime (Credit: VOA)
A Zimbabwean judge has ruled that 16 democracy and human rights activists must remain in jail over the New Year. They are charged with plotting to overthrow President Robert Mugabe, said Irene Petras, director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.
On December 22, 2008, the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy issued a statement on Zimbabwe, expressing its solidarity with the country’s democracy and human rights activists, including World Movement participants. The statement- signed on behalf of the Steering Committee by its chair, The Hon. Kim Campbell, former Prime Minister of Canada, and two other members, Michael Danby, an Australian member of parliament, and Jana Hybaskova, a Czech member of the European Parliament- calls for the immediate release of abducted democracy and human rights activists, including prominent human rights activist and Zimbabwe Peace Project leader Jestina Mukoko.
The Steering Committee urges the international community to act to protect Zimbabwean citizens from the severely deteriorating economic, health, and humanitarian situation, a consequence of the continuing political crisis.
A wave of strikes and protests by China’s upwardly mobile working class - factory workers, cab drivers, teachers, and even police officers - is causing concern within the ruling elite, prompting a clampdown on political dissent. Leading dissidents were detained last week after signing Charter 08 calling for greater democracy, an initiative which led President Hu Jintao to reiterate that China “will never copy the model of the Western political system.”
While officially committed to building a “harmonious society” and “putting people first”, China’s leaders have reason to be cautious about a citizen backlash to restructuring, notes The Economist. It quotes the China Labour Bulletin’s recent joint-report with Canada’s Rights and Democracy that millions of laid-off workers have been left near-destitute due to corruption and poor policy.
The ruling Communist party has long feared the rise of an independent labor movement, proscribing unofficial unions and arresting labor rights advocates. With the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations approaching, the regime is also wary of workers and other social protest groups linking up with unemployed graduates to create the kind of alliance that was crushed by the subsequent massacre.
Having recently conceded the legal right to collective bargaining, some observers believe the party will now be pushed to legalize strikes. “It’s increasingly untenable to view strikes as unacceptable, there are simply too many of them and they are everywhere now,” Robin Munro, China Labour Bulletin’s research director. “They’re happening whether they’re legal or not.”
Reducing unemployment among university graduates will be the government’s main priority next year, prime minister Wen Jiabao said at the weekend. “The creation of a huge population of educated unemployed is worrying for the ruling Communist party, which is keenly aware of the historic role disgruntled students have played in inciting rebellion,” the Financial Times reports, noting that “Mao Zedong, who led the Communists to victory in 1949, was himself an educated son of a rich peasant who had his scholarly ambitions thwarted.”
The regime has been eager to claim credit for China’s dramatic economic growth, basing its legitimacy on performance - its ability to deliver jobs and rising living standards - rather than ideology. But that means that citizens are also blaming the government for the current economic downturn and resulting job losses.
“Government leaders portray themselves as the answer to every problem, expressing their willingness to use public resources to help those left behind by the new prosperity, rather than counting on new businesses to create jobs,” notes one observer, highlighting an ideological shift back toward statism.
The Communist party is “struggling to contain economic fallout,” suggests another observer. “They are all too aware that without the promise of wealth, or if that promise crumbles, then their claims to legitimacy crumble as well.”
The regime’s ideological statism and suspicion of independent organizations means that China’s civil society remains small and unable to act as a shock-absorber - delivering services and providing a channel for peaceful protest - as it does in free societies.
Because an NGO is “essentially an assembly that is capable of collective action and powerfully challenging the government politically,” notes Beijing scholar Kang Xiaoguang, the government has been wary, tolerating social service NGOs addressing issues like poverty alleviation, but keeping any remotely political NGOs under tight control.
The government’s strategy has shifted from across-the-board banning of independent groups to one of “control by categories,” notes Kang, cited by the must-read China Digital Times. Many NGOs have become GONGOs as a result of “elite-ification” - with Chinese retired officials and elite offspring taking key jobs - while many other NGOs have been limited by size. The regime tolerates local NGOs but is wary of national-scale independent groups. It is as if a “high-voltage power line” was suspended above them, he writes.
Today’s must-read: Vaclav Havel makes the case that China’s human rights activists need support. He refers specifically to the signatories of Charter 08, an appeal for democratic reform and human rights inspired by Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 to which Havel was a contributor and signatory.
Charter 08 has now been signed by several thousand individuals, he notes, including China’s “top minds from law, political science, economics, the arts and culture.” But Beijing’s response has been as short-sighted and repressive as the communist regime in Prague:
Rather than respond to our offer of engagement with dialogue and debate, the Czechoslovak government instead chose repression. It arrested some of the signatories, interrogated and harassed others, and spread disinformation about our movement and its aims.
So too has the Chinese government declined the invitation to discuss with the signatories of Charter 08 the merits of their proposal. Instead, it has detained two signatories, Liu Xiaobo and Zhang Zuhua, both of whom the government has identified as lead actors in its creation. Mr. Zhang has been released, but Mr. Liu, a prominent writer and intellectual, is still being held incommunicado without charge.
Dozens of others have been interrogated, and an unknowable number are being watched by state security agents as they make phone calls and type email messages on behalf of their jailed comrades. Soon after Charter 77 was issued, I was arrested for the commission of “serious crimes against the basic principles of the Republic.” It is feared that Mr. Liu will be charged with “incitement to subvert state power,” a similarly arbitrary crime…..
The Chinese government should learn well the lesson of the Charter 77 movement: that intimidation, propaganda campaigns, and repression are no substitute for reasoned dialogue.
The looming succession crisis in Egypt may be exposing latent rifts within the ruling elite of the National Democratic Party. The military, which has produced every president in the post-independence period, is reportedly uncomfortable at the prospect of Hosni Mubarak’s civilian son assuming the office.
The Speaker of the Egyptian Parliament has now weighed in. “Authority is granted by the will of the people and not through bequeathal,” Fathi Srour told the Almasry Alyoum* newspaper today, insisting that “even in monarchies, bequeathal is conducted in accordance with the law…” (translation by Mideastwire).
The regime appears to be at a strategic impasse, clearly in the stop phase of what Carnegie’s Michelle Dunne calls a process of start-and-stop liberalization, with the ruling NDP suffering an acute legitimacy crisis, in part due to the obvious coupling of wealth and authority, and the alienation of technocratic reformists like Hala Mustafa, editor of the Democracy Review.
The NDP’s troubles are the “result of a system that severely hinders its activities and a ruling regime that shows no appetite for political reform,” notes a special supplement on Egypt in today’s Financial Times. “Instead, critics say, the regime resorts to tried-and-tested methods to shackle, infiltrate, divide and silence opponents.”
The FT reporter, perhaps naively, attributes the weakness of the regime’s liberal opponents to internal bickering, neglecting the extent to which the NDP and security services consistently infiltrate and sabotage opposition groups. A recent attack on the HQ of the liberal Ghad party was another example of the regime “stripping away the legality” of the party, says Gameela Ismail, a party official and the wife of imprisoned party leader Ayman Nour. “This is what they always do, the security [forces] and the government, they always target parties to break them into factions and pieces, to let them eat themselves from within,” she says.
The question of political transition will also pose a strategic dilemma to the new U.S administration. “Should Mubarak’s successor eschew reform or not manage crises well, Egypt’s long-term stability will be at stake, a situation which could have a bigger effect on the Arab world’s direction since the Iraq War or any other current issue,” argues Jeffrey Azarva, in a symposium in the Middle East Review of International Affairs.
The United States should push for reinstituting the two-term limit abolished by Anwar Sadat, a move that “would not only allow for the peaceful rotation of power, but it would also help to undo today’s perception of the president as a God-like figure,” Azarva argues. The U.S. should also seek to depoliticize the process for licensing political parties which is currently controlled by an NDP-stacked parliamentary committee that “exercises de facto veto power over the formation of new parties and uses its authority to meddle in the affairs of–and effectively neuter–those it has legalized.”
Arab states fall into three categories when it comes to international human rights instruments, argues Khalil Al-Anani, an Egyptian expert on political Islam and Middle East democratization in the Middle East at the Al-Ahram Foundation. Egypt is in the group of states that simply do not recognize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially the political rights to freedom of expression, assembly, free elections, freedom of belief and religion. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan, Tunisia and the UAE have refused to ratify international conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
A second group, to which Egypt also belongs, alongside Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, purports to respect human rights, but they are unquestionably “authoritarian reserves”, exercising de facto repression against citizens and opponents. A third category of states in effect offer citizens a deal to give up political rights in exchange for economic security and social status, as in the Gulf States.
The Mubarak regime is typical of a new trend towards authoritarianism-by-stealth, as military coups or violently contested transitions give way to what one Egyptian observer calls an apparently “innocuous series of constitutional amendments” ostensibly designed to modernize political standards while consecrating a “camouflaged hereditary succession under a pseudo-democratic republican regime.”
Ayman El-Amir, formerly Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC, is skeptical that the unique circumstances of the much-hyped China model are transferable to Egypt. “The Chinese ‘miracle’ was not achieved under circumstances of corruption, fraudulent elections, monopoly of power, cronyism, misrepresentation of reality by paid government propagandists posing as free journalists, and plunder of the wealth of the nation by a privileged few,” he suggests.
Last week’s 60th anniversary of the passing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was also the 4th anniversary of the imprisonment of Ayman Nour, and the Washington-based Voices for a Democratic Egypt held a Capitol Hill panel highlighting the state of human rights in Egypt. The opportunities for change under a new U.S. administration and the upcoming succession were discussed by exiled dissident Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Neil Hicks of Human Rights First, and Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution (VDE’s detailed notes and an audio recording of the event are available here and for the Project on Middle East Democracy’s take on the event click here.
* Almasry Alyoum is the country’s largest independent newspaper and the only relatively liberal publication, albeit one with a disturbing tendency to publish illiberal anti-Semitic polemics. “Over the past eight years, the United States has invested huge resources in attempting to bring democracy to the Middle East,” one observer recently noted. “But it’s not clear whether that project will succeed as long as America’s natural allies in the region remain themselves so profoundly irrational and illiberal.”
Russia’s Duma is considering a new law that will expand the definition of treason, a move lawyers and activists fear portends a revival of the punitive Soviet approach to dissent. Activists and lawyers suggest that the law is being pushed through in anticipation of increased political dissent and social unrest prompted by the financial crisis and the Kremlin’s economic mismanagement.
Russian law currently defines treason as “hostile actions intended to damage the security of the Russian Federation against foreign threats.” The amended definition would include “rendering financial, material, consultative, or other assistance to a foreign state, a foreign or international organization, or representatives thereof in activities directed against the security of the Russian Federation, including its constitutional system, its sovereignty, its territorial integrity and statehood.”
The proposed law “threatens to revive the Soviet-era habit of placing under suspicion anyone who has contact with foreigners“, the London Times suggests.
‘It is a hint for people to sit tight and keep quiet,’ said lawyer Anna Stavitskaya, who represents the family of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Investigators would enjoy wide discretion in interpreting the new law, she said.
Russia’s ruling elite appears jittery, anxious at the political implications of the financial crisis that is “sending tremors through Russia’s fragile social contract“. The proposed bill signals that the Kremlin is planning to tighten its grip on dissent, Cathy Young reports.
“Is it too much of a stretch to think that this law could be directed against an opposition newspaper or website,” Young asks, “or a human rights group critical of the government, which has received assistance from the USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the Soros Foundation?”
She quotes the following report in the Moscow Times:
In a rare example of grassroots political power, angry protests by drivers prompted lawmakers in the far eastern Primorye region on Monday to ask the country’s two leaders to delay raising import duties on foreign cars. The Primorye regional legislature, led by United Russia deputies, voted unanimously Monday to ask President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to postpone the tariffs, which take effect on Jan. 11, according to a decree signed by Putin. Thousands of drivers took to the streets in several far eastern cities and towns Sunday to protest the tariffs, blocking traffic, clashing with police, openly insulting Putin and Medvedev and even calling on Putin to resign.
She also links to reports in the Russian daily Kommersant about similar protests in Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk.
The United States should abandon both the “myth of externally-orchestrated regime change” and the “illusion of imminent revolution” in Iran, a new analysis suggests. Highly-publicized initiatives to support Iranian reformers have backfired, exposing activists to repressive measures and playing into the hands of a regime eager to portray indigenous democrats as agents of foreign powers, argues Brookings’s Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department advisor.
“Abandoning the regime change fantasy means disbanding or significantly retooling democracy promotion programming for Iran, she contends in a report for the U.S. Institute for Peace. It is understandable that policy-makers seek to replicate the apparent success of democracy assistance in supporting democratic transitions in the likes of Ukraine and Georgia. But Western intervention is the “third rail” in Iranian domestic affairs and conspicuous democracy promotion is likely to backfire on local activists.
The various agents for change within Iran include students and youth, reformist clerics like Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri and a technologically-empowered women’s movement. But, despite what Ladan Boroumand describes as the remarkable resilience of civil society, the opposition currently lacks leadership, organization and a convincing strategy for political change. It also needs to challenge and transcend the current rules of the game.
“The fundamental shortcoming hampering Iran’s democratic aspirations has been the general unwillingness of Iranians to risk their lives and livelihoods to demand the change they want or to defend the dissidents who have been imprisoned for their own advocacy,” she writes.
Meaningful change is unlikely to occur without significant mobilization, but a mixture of repression-induced timidity and fear of political turmoil. “The disinclination of Iranians to mobilize on a mass basis reflects a widespread aversion to unrest and violent change, she notes, “an understandable, if unfortunate, legacy of the Islamic revolution.”
Another analyst notes “Tehran’s trepidation” at the new U.S. administration’s signals on U.S.-Iranian relations:
Tehran’s reception of the early warning signs from Washington are focused on calls for increases in military spending, NATO expansion, boosting intelligence agencies, strengthening of the “nation-building, democracy-promoting” National Endowment for Democracy, …..
Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, won’t be surprised at the Islamic Republic’s hostile response to the prospects of a new administration in Washington. Despite occasional suggestions of Tehran’s openness to dialog with the United States, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s ideological commitment has led him to sabotage any serious initiatives:
Khamenei considers himself not only the leader of the Islamic Republic but also the highest authority on Islamic ideology in the world. He therefore sees himself as responsible for the survival of Islamic ideology and its values, as well as his image as its leader. Because the Islamic Republic has failed to meet its economic, cultural, and social promises, Khamenei has made anti-Americanism the cornerstone of that Islamic ideology.
The plight of Iranian dissidents was recently highlighted by the Omid, the virtual memorial database of the Islamic Republic’s victims, specifically the peaceful dissidents and intellectuals slain in Iran in the fall of 1998:
Ten years ago, on November 22nd 1998, Darioush and Parvaneh Forouhar were brutally murdered in their home by agents of the Ministry of Information. While the Iranian society was still chocked by the news of this abject crime, two members of Iran’s writers’ association, Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Ja’far Pouyandeh disappeared and were found dead on December 3rd and December 10th, 1998, respectively.
(The Forouhar, Mokhtari, and Pouyandeh families are appealing for an independent investigation into these deaths. To support this appeal please send your name and city of residence to daadkhahi@googlemail.com)
A new administration committed to change should maintain continuity in at least one respect - keeping the door open to democratic dissidents. So argues Jackson Diehl in the latest of a series of recommendations that the Obama administration should not ditch the Freedom Agenda.
He notes that President George W. Bush this week marked Human Rights Day by meeting with dissident bloggers and new media activists, including Cuban-American blog Babalu, Alexander Klaskovskiy of Belarus’s Belapan, Burmese blogger Maung Maung Win, Xiao Qiang of China Digital Times, Iran’s Arash Sigarchi, and (via video link) Venezuela’s Miguel Octavio of The Devil’s Excrement.
Xiao Qiang drew the president’s attention to Charter 08, the manifesto for democratic reform and human rights signed and launched by some 300 Chinese intellectuals and activists this week. Mahmoud Saber reminded Bush of the Egyptian bloggers jailed by Hosni Mubarak’s government and noted that presidential attention hasn’t always helped dissidents like the exiled Saad Eddin Ibrahim or the imprisoned Ayman Nour, “a symbol of one vindictive autocrat’s victory over the ‘freedom agenda.’”
But Diehl concludes that Barack Obama should follow Bush’s lead in meeting with democracy activists since, on balance,…
“….the attention of the American president is precious to dissidents. It gains them enormous attention in their own countries and injects their liberal ideas into arenas from which they are usually excluded. Though some may be thrown in jail on their return from the White House, they also gain a de facto immunity from torture or assassination — otherwise a high risk in countries such as Belarus and Burma.”
In yesterday’s posting on Charter 08, a vitally significant initiative on the part of over 300 Chinese dissidents, intellectuals and officials, we neglected to include a link to the Charter itself. So here it is. Perry Link provides a useful introduction, noting that:
The Chinese document calls not for ameliorative reform of the current political system but for an end to some of its essential features, including one-party rule, and their replacement with a system based on human rights and democracy.
The prominent citizens who have signed the document are from both outside and inside the government, and include not only well-known dissidents and intellectuals, but also middle-level officials and rural leaders. They have chosen December 10, the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as the day on which to express their political ideas and to outline their vision of a constitutional, democratic China. They intend “Charter 08″ to serve as a blueprint for fundamental political change in China in the years to come. The signers of the document will form an informal group, open-ended in size but united by a determination to promote democratization and protection of human rights in China and beyond.
The Charter itself raises fundamental question for the communist regime:
Where is China headed in the twenty-first century? Will it continue with “modernization” under authoritarian rule, or will it embrace universal human values, join the mainstream of civilized nations, and build a democratic system? There can be no avoiding these questions.
Concluding…..
China, as a major nation of the world, as one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and as a member of the UN Council on Human Rights, should be contributing to peace for humankind and progress toward human rights. Unfortunately, we stand today as the only country among the major nations that remains mired in authoritarian politics. Our political system continues to produce human rights disasters and social crises, thereby not only constricting China’s own development but also limiting the progress of all of human civilization. This must change, truly it must. The democratization of Chinese politics can be put off no longer.
Accordingly, we dare to put civic spirit into practice by announcing Charter 08. We hope that our fellow citizens who feel a similar sense of crisis, responsibility, and mission, whether they are inside the government or not, and regardless of their social status, will set aside small differences to embrace the broad goals of this citizens’ movement.
You really should read the whole thing.
Police yesterday arrested Liu Xiaobo, one of over 300 signatories to the 08 Charter demanding democracy and human rights
Liu Xiaobo, a leading dissident who mobilized hundreds of Chinese thinkers and writers in calling for democratic reform, has been arrested. Police raided his Beijing home late on Monday a few hours before the release of the “08 Charter”, a manifesto calling on the ruling Communist Party to hold free elections and grant greater freedom of expression. The document’s publication was scheduled to coincide with tomorrow’s 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The 303 signatories propose 19 measures to improve human rights in China, including an independent legal system, freedom of association and an end to single-party rule. The initiative is a conscious throw-back to the Charter 77 declaration by Czechoslovakian dissidents which demanded that the Communist authorities ratify United Nations human rights conventions, and respect the 1975 Helsinki Accords’ human rights obligations.
“All kinds of social conflicts have constantly accumulated, and feelings of discontent have risen consistently,” the 08 Charter states. “The current system has become backward to the point that change cannot be avoided.” China remained the only big power still to retain an authoritarian system that so infringes human rights, it said.
The ‘08 Charter is significant because it convenes diverse, prominent figures around a common agenda, said Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch. “The Chinese government really insists that human rights concerns are an external agenda imposed by Western countries and Western governments, but this gives the lie to this thesis,” he said.
Charter 08 was signed not only by dissidents and intellectuals but also by officials and rural leaders, notes the Chinese Human Rights Defenders network. The signatories will form an informal and open group to promote democratization and human rights, it reports.
